Mansour Abbas
IT WAS A PICTURE NOBODY IN ISRAEL COULD have imagined: the Arab leader of the political party of the Islamic Movement, Mansour Abbas, sitting alongside Naftali Bennett, the envoy of Jewish ultranationalism. But there they were with the secular centrist Yair Lapid on June 2, pens in hand, ready to sign documents bringing a devout Muslim into coalition with two Jewish Zionist leaders. “It was a historic moment,” Abbas tells TIME on June 9 from his party office in Kafr Qana. “Some people in the room teared up.”
Over the past two years, Israelis had gone to the polls four times to elect a government to run the country, and each time Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
